A SURVEY OF BOUQUET'S ROAD, 1764: SAMUEL FINLEY'S FIELD NOTES Part Three Edward G. Williams At the conclusion of the preceding chapter in the progress of -1jlBouquet's army into the hostile wilderness, there was also an end of an all-important reference check, Engineer Thomas Hutchins's large-scale plat map of the road. The map ended at the "Old Indian Encampment" and the landmark spring twenty perches short of Rough Run. From that point, the most useful and instrumental means to check the course of the road against Samuel Finley's notes have been the plat maps by the government surveyors when they set down and marked the boundaries of ranges of townships and surveyed sec- tion subdivisions. Upon these maps they marked by dotted lines the course of the Tuscarawas Path through and across sections and crossings of important streams. The marking of the path upon these surveys, of course, ceased at the Tuscarawas Crossing. For compari- son we have also Hutchins's own published map (nineteen inches in length) and Ratzer's copy map (fifty-five inches in length), a 2.89 times enlargement of the Hutchins map and much more workable. For many years, there have been seemingly unresolvable ques- tions regarding the exact track of the "Great Trail" lleading from the Forks of the Ohio (Pittsburgh) via the famous Tuscarawas Crossing to Sandusky and Detroit. This inquiry concerns only that part of the Great Trail to that historic fording place, where Bouquet's itinerary left the main path and turned southwest toward the Forks of the Muskingum. Perhaps the better way to visualize the problem is to study it in the reverse direction, that is, in its easterly course, for there were compelling motives and objective destinations in that direction, just as there were in the western movement over the same trail. The easterly orientation of this and other trails is less general- ly understood. From times immemorial, even before the eastern seaboard settle- Mr. Williams continues— his series of articles on Samuel Finley's notes of the Bouquet expedition. Editor 1 Wallace, Indian Paths of Pennsylvania, 62-63. 348 EDWARD G. WILLIAMS OCTOBER ments of the white men, the Iroquoian nations of upper New York became the inveterate enemies of the Cherokees and Catawbas of the western Carolinas, Georgia, and eastern Tennessee. 2 Bands of northern warriors traveled yearly southward, as did the southern warriors venture northward, for incredible distances (sometimes as much as eight hundred miles) to secure and bring back the scalps of their fallen foes. Noknights-errant of western Europe traveled with any greater ardor to the Middle East to bring back as trophies arms of the Saracens to adorn the walls of their medieval castles. This route became known as the Great Warriors' Path. When European colonists first came to American shores, the northern Indians were traversing a coastline route that headed the tidewater inlets. As the English settlers began to move inland, the Indians adopted an itinerary that forded the Potomac, Rapidan, James, York, and Dan rivers above the fallline.3 By 1722, the pressure of settlements caused the Great Warriors' Path to remove to the Shenandoah Valley.4 By 1767, the Great Warriors' (or Catawba) Path had removed about fifteen miles west of the Monongahela River, where the chiefs of the Six Nations prohibited further surveying of the Mason and DixonLine.5 In 1770, George Washington, on his trip to inspect the bounty lands of the Virginia soldiers, found the Great Warriors' Path to the Cherokee country ineastern Tennessee crossing the Ohio River in the Big Bend at the mouth of MillCreek (Mill- wood, Jackson County, West Virginia).6 These examples of the vicissitudes of the Great Warriors' paths serve to illustrate the mutability of these early avenues of travel, either from the effects of advancing settlements behind the expanding frontiers, or the consequence of the deterioration and removal of the principal destination. 7 Such was the history of the Great Trail to the 2 Ibid., 177, 180, 27. 3 Fairfax Harrison, Landmarks of OldPrince William[County, Virginia] (privately printed, 1924; reprinted, Berryville, 1964), 446, wrote that the path forded tidewater creeks "only high enough upstream to make use of the lowest fords. ..." "The aboriginal traveler from the north sought to establish contact with the Carolina tribes ... to avoid the English settlements on tide- water [and] must soon have discovered that his most convenient trail through Virginia [led him] to ford all the Virginia rivers above the fall line." Ibid., 454. 4 Ibid., 87, 225. Governor Alexander Spotswood at Albany, New York, in 1722, required the Iroquois to agree to keep their "young men west of the Blue Ridge" mountains. 5 Cummings, Mason and DixonLine, 7S-76. 6 Fitzpatrick, Diaries of Washington, 1:425 ;Hanna, Wilderness Trail, 2:143 ;Cramer, Navigator, 91, 97. 7 Wallace, Indian Paths of Pennsylvania, 180. 1983 A SURVEY OF BOUQUET'S ROAD, 1764 349 Tuscarawas and Detroit. Ihave long maintained that there were two Great trails through Ohio. The first was an Indian trail connecting the Wyandot (Wendat) headquarters at Upper Sandusky with their Iroquoian brothers of the Six Nations 8 centered in four towns at, and near, present New Castle, Pennsylvania. One town was at the junction of the Neshannock and Shenango, forming the Big Beaver; another was two miles below, at the mouth of the Mahoning; the third was three miles south on the western side of the Beaver ;and the fourth was six miles up the Mahoning from its junction. with the Beaver. This cluster of Indian settlements was called collectively "the Kuskuskies," 9 and the Six Nations tribesmen, in addition to some Wyandots, the oldest of the Iroquoian nations, 10 were gathering there in the early decades of the eighteenth century. 11 Pennsylvania traders visited there perhaps as early as 1740. The much-traveled path ran from Sandusky eastward to the crossing place of the Tuscarawas Branch of the Muskingum River, the historic landmark on which converged and from which radiated all the main trails that ran north of the Ohio and west of the Allegheny. This trail became deeply worn with the travel of countless moccasined feet and Indian horses loaded with packs of skins and furs for trading. Later it bore the traffic of white traders' packtrains. Hutchins wrote two descriptions of the high land and water routes (Summit and Por- tage counties commemorate these antique thoroughfares) via the fords of the Cuyahoga and Mahoning rivers, circuitous but dry, from Tusca- rawas to Kuskuskies. 12 Hutchins was vague as tohow the path arrived there, but the Trader's Map ascribed to John Patten helps clear up the uncertainty. Patten was an early trader upon the path who was captured by the French at the Miami Indian town (present Fort Wayne, Indiana) and sent to France. Upon his subsequent release and return to America, he compiled reports and maps of locations and distances by the trails from Philadelphia to the Ohio and the Indian country as far as Detroit and the Wabash (now Indiana) and 8 Hanna, Wilderness Trail,1:7 ;2 :20-21. 9 Ibid., 1:340-47; Robert Proud, History of Pennsylvania, 2 vols. (Phila- delphia, 1798), Christian Frederick Post's Journal, Aug. 17, 1758, 2: app., 71. 10 Hanna, Wilderness Trail, 1:7. 11 Ibid., 1: 348-49. 12 Ibid., 1:351, 385 (map) ;2: 201. The appended map depicts Mahoning Town after 1763. Before that time it is thought to have been one of the Kuskusky group, possibly the town located at present Edinburg, Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, or at Youngstown, Ohio. After the French capitulation, in1763, the Iroquoians, or Mingoes, in the town moved farther up the Mahoning than the Salt Lick Town, which was a mile southwest of Niles, Ohio. 350 EDWARD G. WILLIAMS OCTOBER probably into Michigan. He was killed in 1754 on a sailing expedition to find a northwest passage to the Orient. 13 The Trader's Map, though much out of scale and wrongly orient- ed in true direction, does plainly depict two trails emanating from the Tuscarawas Crossing, soon separating, running parallel for fifteen to twenty miles, then describing straight lines, one to the Kuskuskies and the other to Shannopin's Town above the Point at present-day Pittsburgh. No fort or other landmark is shown, indicating that the map was made before the construction of Fort Duquesne. The trail crossed the Allegheny River at the Shannopin's Town location be- tween Thirty-fourth and Thirty-seventh or Thirty-eighth streets (be- low the Allegheny Arsenal buildings) in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh, 14 then passed over the mountains to what the map identi- fied as "Ray town of Juniata." Like nearly all extremely old maps, freehand-drawn lines connect points. A few miles east of Raystown where Fort Bedford was to be constructed several years in the future, at the place later designated Bloody Run (Everett), the path turned southward on the Warriors' Path that led via Town Creek to Old- town, Maryland, on the Potomac, thence through Virginia to enter the 13 Howard N. Eavenson, "Who Made the Trader's Map'?" PMHB 65 (Oct. 1941) :424. 14 Wallace, Indian Paths of Pennsylvania, 170. Wallace has correctly stated that the trail crossed the Allegheny River to Shannopin's Town. (Before the existence of Fort Duquesne or Fort Pitt, there was no reason for it to cross farther down toward the Point at Pittsburgh.) All agree that Shannopin's was at the mouth of Twomile Run. The hollow formed by Two- mile Run may be viewed from the Herron Avenue bridge where the tracks, formerly of the Pennsylvania Railroad and now owned by Conrail, are starting to run below surface level but are about one hundred feet below many streets by the time they reach Liberty Avenue at Thirty-third Street.